Tone-Word Recognition in Mandarin Chinese: Influences of lexical-level representations

To recognise a spoken word, one has to access the phonological knowledge of this word mentally represented at a lexical (whole-word) level and the knowledge of consonants and vowels encoded at a sublexical level. For Mandarin Chinese, the meaning of a word is decided by not only the combination of consonants and vowels but also lexical tones. In this book, Jinxing Yue investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying word recognition in native Mandarin speakers,with a particular focus on the role of lexical-level representations. Chapter 1 reviews relevant studies and concepts. The two main issues addressed by the thesis are also introduced: the influence of lexical-level representation on the processing of sublexical features and the temporal and spatial features of the neural activities in the early phase of word recognition. Chapter 2 presents a study investigating the interaction between the lexical-level representation and the tonal representation at a sublexical level with auditory lexical decision tasks. Chapter 3 describes a study examining how lexical and sublexical representations influence form priming in monosyllabic tonal word-forms with tone contrasts in Mandarin Chinese. Chapter 4 presents an ERP study monitoring the rapid development of new cortical memory traces of a Mandarin pseudo-word. Chapter 5 reports the results of an ERP study exploring neural evidence of access to lexical-level representations in the N1 time window, which is temporally earlier than an MMN time window. In Chapter 6, a revised TRACE model,namely the TRACE-Tone model is described.